EvilZone

General Tech => Hardware => : Kulverstukas October 04, 2010, 05:02:24 PM

: Make your old flash drive bootable!
: Kulverstukas October 04, 2010, 05:02:24 PM
Tutorial by Kulverstukas. w00t.

Hello. Here I will show you how, in a very simple way, to make your old as earth flash drive bootable again! It worked for me very good when I wanted to make my flash drive carry Puppy Linux. Doing this way, the computer must support booting from a flash drive whatsoever, although I am not 100% sure about that, because I didn't have old enough PC that would not support booting from a flash drive. So to make your flash drive bootable we will be using a tool called "HP USB Disk Storage Format Tool" (only windows) and "Windows 95" files. You can download everything from here: http://www.mediafire.com/?mmw3dh3scrz0cl6


When it's done the flash drive will be formatted and the files needed for booting will be copied. Now when you will install some system, like Linux (what else... :P) do not format the drive or everything will be gone and you will have to re-do everything.
: Re: Make your old flash drive bootable!
: ande October 04, 2010, 05:52:58 PM
Mirror: http://evilzone.org/downloads/failai_bootinimuj.zip :)
: Re: Make your old flash drive bootable!
: ZonTa November 27, 2010, 05:23:20 AM
Do you have a solution for a computer that doesn't have USB boot ? That computer have 2 USB ports but it doesn't have USB boot option.
: Re: Make your old flash drive bootable!
: iTpHo3NiX November 27, 2010, 05:32:35 AM
Do you have a solution for a computer that doesn't have USB boot ? That computer have 2 USB ports but it doesn't have USB boot option.

Your only hope would be a bios update. Its up to the bios to allow to boot off of USB. The older the board the less likely you will be able to do it unless you can flash the bios with a newer one. If you'd like I can look more into it if you give me the model number of the board you're looking to boot off of.
: Re: Make your old flash drive bootable!
: 10n1z3d November 28, 2010, 10:10:04 PM
I'm using UNetbootin (http://unetbootin.sourceforge.net/) to create my flash drives boot-able which is a pretty neat tool, although I'm not sure if it supports Puppy Linux.
: Re: Make your old flash drive bootable!
: ande November 28, 2010, 10:32:24 PM
I'm using UNetbootin (http://unetbootin.sourceforge.net/) to create my flash drives boot-able which is a pretty neat tool, although I'm not sure if it supports Puppy Linux.

I have used that one aswell, for my tablet with no cd-rom :)
: Re: Make your old flash drive bootable!
: Kulverstukas November 28, 2010, 10:39:41 PM
Yep, it supports Puppy Linux and a variety other systems. UNetBootIn comes on Windows AND Linux. Cool eh? :D
: Re: Make your old flash drive bootable!
: iTpHo3NiX November 28, 2010, 10:44:03 PM
UNetBootIn is the best there is as far as creating a bootable usb for both windows (if you have an iso) as well as various nix distros. However that wont fix the problem if the bios doesn't support booting off of a USB stick ;)
: Re: Make your old flash drive bootable!
: Satan911 November 29, 2010, 02:49:19 PM
And I'm just gonna go with everyone and say I also support Unetbootin. Simple and effective tool.
: Re: Make your old flash drive bootable!
: iLike November 29, 2010, 08:00:37 PM
Universal USB Installer (http://www.pendrivelinux.com/downloads/Universal-USB-Installer/Universal-USB-Installer.exe) is supposed to work great as well. The folks at ubuntu.com recommend that to write an ubuntu image to a USB flashdrive.

Note, I've never used this before, I always use Unetbootin. Works great, other than that it fucked my USB flashdrive over. (it rewrote the partition table, nothing big :3)
: Re: Make your old flash drive bootable!
: Kulverstukas November 30, 2010, 10:38:10 PM
Well... this tools : http://old.linuxliveusb.com/ (http://old.linuxliveusb.com/) also does install all kinds of distros to USB flash drive. It's also written in AutoIT and comes only for Windows.
I have used this few times in the past before I discovered UNetBootInt and I must say it works great aswell.
: Re: Make your old flash drive bootable!
: theellimist December 07, 2010, 04:34:02 PM
Cool post, how much space does UNetbootin take up on the drive?
: Re: Make your old flash drive bootable!
: PublicEnemy December 07, 2010, 06:01:51 PM
2.789kB on my drive.
: Re: Make your old flash drive bootable!
: B1naryF1nary December 08, 2010, 08:04:26 AM
I personally like Katana:
http://www.hackfromacave.com/katana.html#katana_download (http://www.hackfromacave.com/katana.html#katana_download)
If I remember correctly you extract the .rar archive straight to your flash and then run the install batch file in the boot folder.
It is a nice suite of tools if you have a large flash drive.
: Re: Make your old flash drive bootable!
: Kulverstukas December 08, 2010, 11:02:00 PM
Cool post, how much space does UNetbootin take up on the drive?
That depeneds on the distro you want. Puppy Linux takes ~900 MB installed.
: Re: Make your old flash drive bootable!
: FuyuKitsune January 12, 2011, 04:16:52 AM
Do you have a solution for a computer that doesn't have USB boot ? That computer have 2 USB ports but it doesn't have USB boot option.
PLoP Boot Manager is sweet for that. It can be installed to disk, USB, CD, or floppy. I keep a spare PLoP BM floppy lying around in case I need to work on old computers.